I’m always curious about the reasons why 35 percent of us vote against school levies. Maybe you’re in this group, and you have good reasons, but we just haven’t heard them yet. No one filled out a statement against in the voter’s pamphlet this year.

School funding is one of the third rails of local politics, and opponents tend to tread carefully. When the local school impact fee was discussed in the City Council meetings, even the building developers’ group was reluctantly in favor of it. I doubt that angry moms would stop buying houses if they were against school funding, but there’s no sense in testing that theory if you’re a developer trying to sell them.

I know the supporters of levies might be thinking, “What is this weird-beard idiot saying! Is he going to give people a reason to vote no?”

Well, the beard isn’t that weird. And I don’t have any good reasons to vote against them.

I’ll be up front with you; my kids are home-schooled, so I suppose I should be voting against these levies, along with those of you who don’t have kids. However, I’ll be voting yes for both of them, and I hope you will too.

We all have to chip in for services we don’t necessarily use, just for the greater good; 99 percent of the people in the city don’t drive on the road to my house, but we all chipped in to help build it anyway. Thank you all for that, but there is a small drainage issue I’ve been meaning to ask you about.

Because of levy supporters in my hometown, I was able to go to computer labs in sixth grade, starting with the Apple IIc (I’m dating myself here). There were a number of kids in that school who got hooked on those computers, and a quick survey on Facebook showed me that the kids who went to the computer lab are now way ahead of their peers.

One of my old friends got hooked enough to turn those early computer skills into a Hollywood career, and he helped start one of the first college visual effects departments to train more kids to create visual effects for movies. His latest film was the Transformers sequel, and no, I didn’t get any cool stuff from the movie.

My Apple IIc skills eventually turned into a Web site development career, and also into the guy that everybody can ask to help fix their computer. It’s not that the school itself gave me these skills directly, but just having the technology available taught me how to think differently, and in a way that makes learning come much easier.

It amazes me that Washington state doesn’t consider technology part of the basic education requirements. Technology affects nearly every job today, and certainly affects how we’re spending our free time. If we don’t learn how to manipulate and control technology, it will end up controlling us instead, and we’ll become overly dependent on the people who can.

When it comes to reasons not to vote for the levies, I can’t fall back on the “economic downturn” argument either; 2009 was tough for a lot of us, and my father-in-law was out of work the entire year. He’s still looking, and has been staying with us until something turns up.

But as I’ve said before, most of us have a lot of disposable income. It doesn’t feel like it sometimes because we’re always consuming, and always living right up to our means and many times beyond it. This downturn is temporary, and we will recover. We’re very blessed to live in a country with such wealth and opportunity, and I hate to see us squander it to save a few dollars for our own selfish reasons.

So to those of you in the 35 percent group, I’d like to ask you to consider why you vote no, and convince me. I’m very open-minded, and if you can convince me, I’ll take up your cause, send an e-mail to ryanryals@ymail.com.

Until then, it’s a yes from me.